Food safety is an integral part of many food manufacturers’ quality programs.  Often these programs although desirable fail to both protect the consumer and maintain low levels of rejected product.  Metal detection systems are seen as a ‘non value added’ machine within the system of candy manufacturing.  I take a different view of this.  Contaminate detection is a high value added part of any process.

How can metal detection increase your bottom line?

Simply, reduce waste, protect your brand and lead the industry for safe product production.  Imagine what would happen if your product made it to market and caused a serious injury or worse death of a consumer.  How would you recover from this?  What would be the cost both immediate and long term?  The cost to recover from such a disaster would be in magnitude to the cost of implementing an effective contaminate detection program.

So what’s the right way to detect metal in a candy company?

Start first at the back door.  Here is were you have greater control of contaminates being introduced in to your process.  Place a metal detection system at each entry point such as rail car loading etc.  Using a gravity feed metal detection system (such as the Goring Kerr model 401) to detect metal with in the raw ingredients will help you take control of what your suppliers are selling you as well increase your ability to detect small pieces.  After this point look for areas where ingredients are mixed together and have a high potential for introduction of metal fragments (tramp metal).  Again this point is a low cost to the end product costs.  Finally have a metal detector after the product is packaged or just before.  This last resort will help to detect larger pieces of metal within the product.

Having several metal detection systems within your process may seem to add unnecessary costs but in fact help to reduce operation costs and increase product/brand equity.

Plastic chain belting allows for quick and easy repair or replacement and simpler system design.  Typically you do not need to track plastic chain belting.  The belt locks in to geared drive on the conveyor belt roller at both the tail and head pulley that align the belt automatically.  This design inherently removes complex belt tracking systems.  The disadvantage to plastic chain belting is smooth transfer; all sections are square and 'bump' as he round the pulleys and belt clogging or buildup of material.

Flat belting is used in many applications fro the snack food industry, packaging machinery, paper manufacturing and electronics.  The range is seemingly endless and option as far as you can see.  Flat belts come in layers and are built up to improve strength and wear characteristics.  The top surface can be made to grip or grab (rubber belt) materials and move them easily up hill.  The downside is that replacing a conveyor belt you typically need an exact replacement, or a belting repair kit to splice a new section in.  Some belting and applications allow for using a zipper for quicker repairs.

When choosing a conveyor design look carefully at how the belting system works and ask yourself – What will I do when the belt fails?

The importance of automation and robots in all manufacturing industries is growing. Industrial robots have replaced human beings in a wide variety of industries. Robots out perform humans in jobs that require precision, speed, endurance and reliability. Robots safely perform dirty and dangerous jobs. Traditional manufacturing robotic applications include material handling (pick and place), assembling, painting, welding, packaging, palletizing, product inspection and testing. Industrial robots are used in a diverse range of industries including automotive, electronics, medical, food production, biotech, pharmaceutical and machinery.

The ISO definition of a manipulating industrial robot is "an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator". According to the definition it can be fixed in place or mobile for use in industrial automation applications. These industrial robots are programmable in three or more axes. They are multi-functional pieces of equipment that can be custom-built and programmed to perform a variety of operations.

The major advantages of industrial robots is that they can be programmed to suit industry specific requirements and can work continuously for years, consistently meeting high manufacturing quality standards. The economic life span of an industrial robot is approximately 12-16 years. Due to their persistent accuracy industrial robots have become an indispensable part of manufacturing.

Industrial robots are classified into different categories based on their mechanical structure. The major categories of industrial robots are:

• Gantry (Cartesian) Robot: They are stationary robots having three elements of motion. They work from an overhead grid with a rectangular work envelope. They are mainly used to perform ‘pick and place’ actions. Gantry robots have all their axes above the work making them also ideal for dispensing applications.
• SCARA Robots: (Selectively Compliant Articulated Robot Arm) These robots have 4 axes of motion. They move within an x-y-z coordinated circular work envelope. They are used for factory automation requiring pick and place work, application and assembly operations and handling machine tools.
• Articulated robots: An articulated robot has rotary joints. It can have from two to ten or more interactive joints. Articulated robots are well suited to welding, painting and assembly.

Basic industrial robot designs can be customized with the addition of different peripherals. End effectors, optical systems, and motion controllers are essential add-ons. End effectors are the end-of-arm-tooling (EOAT) attached to robotic arms. Grippers or wrenches that are used to move or assemble parts are examples of end effectors. End effectors are designed and used to sense and interact with the external environment. The end effectors’ design depends on the application requirements of the specific industry. Machine Vision systems are robotic optical systems. They are built-on digital input/output devices and computer networks used to control other manufacturing equipment such as robotic arms. Machine vision is used for the inspection of manufactured goods such as semiconductor chips. Motion controllers are used to move robots and position stages smoothly and accurately with sub-micron repeatability.

Industrial robots fill the need for greater precision, reliability, flexibility and production output in the increasingly competitive and complex manufacturing industry environment.

By Frank Vanella

Maintain conveyor belts with conveyor brushes

Conveyor belts can easily be termed as the heart of your machinery and your assembly. Most companies that have a high end production line maintain the conveyor belts in pristine condition.

You might think that maintaining the conveyor belts and getting rid of the dirt, debris, loose material and contaminants would require more manual labor and increased costs. But this is where you are wrong.

A completely automated conveyor belt cleaning system which involves conveyor brushes is the need of the day. An oven brush or a shaft on core brush can help you to clean and maintain your conveyor belt and keep it running at all times.

This also reduces the risk of your employees sustaining injuries and burns while attempting to clean the belt.

Advantages galore

You can get custom designed brushes to coordinate with the mounting and drive mechanisms. Depending on the kind of conveyor system, you can choose from a wide variety of brushes.

From carbon steel or high temperature nylon fill brushes for oven conveyors to spiral open wound brushes for cooling conveyors.

There are several ways in which you can further save costs.

• If you buy a heavy duty core brush, then you can simply refill the brush and save costs on a new assembly.
• On the other hand, if you choose an un-mounted brush, you can save costs by in house assembly.
• You can also buy use and throw brushes which can simply be disposed and replaced for fresh use.

Spiral conveyor brushes

Spiral conveyor brushes are the latest ones to hit the circuit and are fast replacing all conventional cleaning systems.

These brushes improve quality, productivity and reduce on the conveyor system downtime. Designed by experienced engineers, these brushes can give a new lease of life to your conveyor belt system.

By Rama Krishna

A new metal detector targeted at the food processing sector offers minimal loss of good material due to a fast reacting, powerful pneumatic drive for the reject gate, says the manufacturer.

German firm Wiese Förderelemente has rolled out a magnetically detectable polypropylene pendulum bucket for quick detection of unwanted plastics, in response to growing demand for detectable plastic materials in conveyor buckets.